How Not to Respond to Negative Online Reviews

Mistakes that get you into legal troubles and diminish patients’ trust

In this installment of “The Wired Practice,” Ron Harman King explains that there are legal limits when responding to online reviews. Seeking removal of the review, responding without following proper guidelines or suing the commenter can be harmful to the practice. Even if you feel that a review is false or misleading, learn how to gracefully – and legally – respond to help keep your online reputation intact.

For more on how to handle online reviews, view the first installment: Dissed By Unhappy Patients? Here’s What to Do.

Watch the video on MedPage Today

Video transcript

In our last video blog and the wired practice, we looked at how to respond to patients’ online reviews of doctors. In this blog, we’re going to discuss how not to respond to patient reviews.

First, let’s recall from the previous segment that rate your doctor websites allow healthcare providers to respond to reviews about them as long as they have registered on the website. This process is called claiming your identity. However, in responding to reviews on websites where they are published, a health care provider cannot publicly comment on the patient’s health or treatment without very clear permission in advance from the patient. It’s against privacy laws. You can’t even publicly acknowledge a person is a patient. However, in your response to an online complaint, you can comment on your practices general policies and procedures, and you can certainly say thank you for an online compliment. For more on responding to critical online reviews, please see the last installment of the wired practice blog.

In a similar vein, you don’t want to openly dispute an online complaint in your response, because arguing with the patient in a public forum, such as the Internet, makes doctors and nurses appear defensive and insensitive, to be sure there’s nothing wrong with countering a complaint with additional mitigating information. An example might be a patient who is unhappy about being sent to another doctor. In this case, the response might be to explain that doctors frequently refer patients to specialists or to sub-specialists with more experience in certain areas, because it’s in the patient’s best interests. Another important no-no to avoid is asking the website publishers to remove a critical review about you. Mine you, rate your doctor websites do occasionally take down reviews, but removal is quite rare and only for very valid reasons. Grounds for removal include reviews that are obscene, exceptionally malicious or clearly fake. Otherwise, review websites actually depend on critical reviews, because without them the site has far less credibility. Repeatedly asking for removal marks you to the website publisher as a chronic whiner. You wind up as the boy who cried wolf. You don’t want to look that way. My advice saves such requests for only the rarest most outrageous criticisms which you can protest with strong objective reasons.

Lastly, threatening a lawsuit or suing over an online review is all but guaranteed to get you nowhere. Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University in California and a former Silicon Valley attorney. For years, Mr. Goldman has tracked doctor lawsuits against patients who complained online Looking at some three dozen cases, he found that two-thirds were dismissed, five were settled and five were unresolved. Of all these cases, the closest to any legal victory any physician appeared to have come was his patient being issued a temporary restraining order to stay away from the doctor. In one case, the patient was actually awarded $50,000 under what’s known as an anti-SLAPP statute, which are state laws permitting consumer rights of free expression. All this may suggest that rate-your-doctor websites and indeed patients themselves are overwhelmingly biased against health care providers. But I can tell you our research indicates just the opposite. In a study of nearly 35,000 online reviews of doctors, we found that 69 percent ­­– 69 percent, more than two-thirds, actually rated their health care providers with either four or five stars out of five possible.

Bottom line, anyone on the surface profession, including my own, will always have at least a few disgruntled customers. Fortunately, I’m happy to report the doctors on balance have some of the highest levels of patient satisfaction and remain one of the most admired, respected, trusted and thanked professions in our society.